Obama strategy gets GOP to buy into federal school standards

If there are two things Republicans hate, it is expansion of federal power and the stimulus package.

But that comes with an asterisk.

*Except when it's about education.

We are witnessing an unprecedented federal intrusion into public schools, on scale with the federal intrusion into health care.

And it's being done by using money from the fiscal stimulus.

As far as plots go, it is diabolically clever. Yet you haven't heard a peep of protest about it from Republicans who otherwise can't stop screaming about President Barack Obama's big-government agenda.

This is because conservative school reformers such as Jeb Bush are on board with what he is doing.

So am I.

Obama basically is taking the next step beyond President George W. Bush's flawed No Child Left Behind law. That has required states to test students and measure learning gains made by various demographic groups. The problem is that there are 50 states with 50 different standards and 50 different assessment tests.

That makes it difficult to compare kids across state lines.

For example, state standards in Mississippi may require that a third-grader be able to read "The Cat in the Hat" and add 2 plus 2, while a third-grader in Massachusetts might be required to read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'' and figure out the square root of pi.

Some states deliberately dumb down their standards and tests to inflate scores.

The Obama administration wants to end this charade by measuring all students with the same measuring stick. The means creating uniform academic standards — all third graders must know this and all fifth-graders must know that and so on and so forth — as well as uniform tests to make sure they really do know it.

If all goes according to plan, students in Florida will face the same rigorous curriculum and tests in language arts and math as students in Massachusetts — a state regarded as the nation's gold standard in public schools.

This will happen by the 2014-15 school year. Then standards could be developed for science.

It is the biggest overhaul in public education in my lifetime and is being accomplished without passing a single piece of legislation.

That is the ingenious part.

The traditional federal approach is to crank out mandates and cram them down the states' throats. If Obama attempted that with education standards, there would be a revolt.

Instead, his administration got the states to come together and devise the standards. So rather than coming across as a federal dictate, it comes across as an initiative from the states.

The administration did this with bribes. A tiny fraction of the stimulus package went toward "Race to the Top,'' a grant program that doles out money to states that enact education reforms.

The money was used to lure states into the cooperative effort. Florida and Massachusetts were two leaders. The final requirements, known as the "common core standards," were completed this year.

Here is a math requirement for high-school students: "Use geometric descriptions of rigid motions to transform figures and to predict the effect of a given rigid motion on a given figure; given two figures, use the definition of congruence in terms of rigid motions to decide if they are congruent."

Evidently, the kids in Singapore can do it, meaning the kids here had better be able to do it as well if we are to compete with them.

But such standards will be meaningless if the states don't ensure that their kids can indeed predict the effect of a given rigid motion on a given figure. And this takes us to the next phase of the Obama agenda, which is coming up with the appropriate tests to measure what they know.

There are two groups of states working on tests, one led by Massachusetts and Florida and the other by Oregon and Washington.

Both will expand beyond multiple-choice tests to open-answer questions designed to measure "higher-order critical thinking.''

If there is a difference, it seems that the Florida group is a bit more hard-nosed about ensuring all kids meet specific standards.

For those who hate the current FCAT, the good news is that it is going away. The bad news is that is being replaced by much harder tests.